Asia loves Facebook, Latin America loves WhatsApp

The potentially global reach of social media
networks is among their defining characteristics. For the first time in
history, it is as easy to video-chat and share everyday news with friends on
the other side of the planet as with friends in the same city.

Yet the actual penetration of social media
networks differs markedly from place to place. According to data from Reach in
June 2013, for example, WhatsApp is installed on over 90% of iPhones in Latin
America, but under 10% in the United States; Line is on 44% of Spanish handsets
yet 1% of French ones; and KakaoTalk is practically universal in South Korea,
but nearly unknown beyond East Asia.

Asia’s social login scene is dominated by
Facebook, with 82% of the market, Google+ scoring just 2%; in North America,
the figures are much closer at 47% and 31%, respectively.

Then there’s China, with a social media scene
all of its own. With global behemoths Facebook and Twitter kept out by the
Great Firewall, their niches in the social media ecosystem are divided among
the likes of Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Renren and Qzone. Despite barely
penetrating beyond China, WeChat has more total number of users than WhatsApp,
Line, Viber or Skype.

In the same way that isolation allowed
different creatures to evolve on the Galapagos Islands and Madagascar, the
equivalence between Chinese networks and their global counterparts is far from
exact. While Weibo resembles Twitter in limiting posts to 140 characters, it
resembles Facebook in allowing threaded comments and likes.

Some of the differences in use of social media
networks are driven by cultural circumstances. Unlike on Twitter, for example,
it is common for users of Sina Weibo to post jpegs of longer chunks of text –
because images are more likely to escape the censors, who are searching text
for keywords. It is also because Chinese users usually do not have the patience
to follow the links inside Weibo messages.

Censorship shapes the Chinese social media
scene in other ways. Following a 2013 crackdown which saw several social
commentators on Weibo arrested and the accounts of some political opinion
leaders erased, there has been a shift to WeChat; the facility to broadcast
some things publicly and share others privately with small groups is increasingly
being used for social organizing, as well as for sports team fans to connect
and for teachers to get together with students.

Beyond the unique circumstances of the Chinese
market, there are examples of how companies have failed to adapt sufficiently
to local circumstances to create a critical mass. But, in general, the extent
to which cultural differences underlie social media differences should not be
overstated.

Many of the current differences in social media
use are best explained not by culture, but by historical trends in device use.
In Europe and North America, for example, many people were accustomed to
accessing social networks on PCs before buying smartphones as a supplementary
device; across Asia, it is more common for people’s first experience of the
internet and social media to be on a smartphone.

Mobile optimization underlies why, for example,
Skype has been caught quickly by the likes of WhatsApp, Line and Viber, despite
having a six or seven year head start – Skype was optimized for the PC and has
had to adapt to mobile use, while its newer competitors launched with mobile in
mind.

Skype is not alone: all social media networks
which evolved in a context where PCs dominated, and mobile internet access was
based on WAP, have had to re-customize for a smartphone-dominated world. The
extent of their success in doing so – or in buying up more mobile-savvy
upstarts – will determine how much market share they can hold on to against
younger competitors.

As the same smartphone devices become ubiquitous
around the world, it is arguable that the social media landscape will gradually
converge. Whichever culture they were brought up in, young people with an
iPhone tend to find the same features useful.